Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Author:Curtis Sittenfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781588364500
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

I was so desperate to be gone from the hospital that back on the first floor, despite the wait in front of me, I walked outside and stood beneath the porte cochere with my arms folded, peering across the parking lot. Campus was about five miles away, but if it hadn’t been dark out, I’d have started off on foot.

It was dark, though, and it was cold, too. I lasted roughly a minute before I went back inside and sat by a soda machine in the waiting area. I wanted very badly to be in the dorm, wearing my nightgown, beneath my own clean sheet and blankets.

I had no wallet with me, no money at all. If I did have money, I’d get a root beer, I thought, and then I thought, but if Sin-Jun hadn’t wanted to die, was it plausible to believe she’d wanted to end up here? The pills had to have been an impulsive decision, a matter of not this; anything except this moment.

So Sin-Jun, too—I had never suspected. Not, probably, that it would have changed the outcome of events if I had. After all, these were not topics you could discuss with someone else; what was there to say to another person about how it felt? You could concoct things you wanted but in certain moments the light shifted or time slowed—on Sundays in particular, time slowed, and occasionally on Saturday afternoons, if you didn’t have a game—and you saw that it was all really nothing. It was just endlessness and what you got or didn’t get would hardly make a difference, and then what was there? The loathsomely familiar room where you lived, your horrible face and body, and the rebuke of other people, how they were unbothered, how you would seem, if you tried to explain, kind of weird and kind of boring and not even original. Why did their lives proceed so easily? Why was it that you needed to convince them and they needed to be convinced and not the other way around? Not, of course, that you would actually succeed if you tried.

And then at dinner, we talked about what? Teachers or movies or spring vacation. It was just what you did; you socialized, you interacted. And the things you said, the walk from chapel to the schoolhouse, your backpack, tests, these were a bridge running above the rushing water of what you actually felt. The goal was: learn to ignore what’s down below. Fine if you met someone else who was the same as you, but you had to realize that nothing another person could do would make you feel better about any of it. In an odd way, suicide attempts seemed to me—I wouldn’t have thought this as a freshman, but I thought it now, two years later—naÏve. They didn’t achieve anything, the drama they set in motion couldn’t possibly be sustained. In the end, there was always your regular life, and no one could deal with it but you.

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